Feature rich personal wireless devices are now common personal accessories. Such devices include mobile phones, personal digital assistants, and one-way and two-way paging devices, among others. Oftentimes, these devices include a calendaring or task reminder system that notifies a user of an appointment or pending task. Ordinarily, the user configures the system with a description of an item and an associated completion or appointed time, which may include date information. An alert is triggered when the current calendar time coincides with the specified time of one or more configured items. The reminder function is one of the more popular features among users of personal digital assistants and high-end mobile phones.
Recently, there has been an effort to include location-determining capabilities in mobile devices. Location information may be provided through receivers for the well-known Global Positioning System (GPS), a satellite based system, or through land-based transmitters, among other possibilities. The potential availability of current location information has resulted in various application proposals. One such proposal is described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,317,718, issued to Fano on Nov. 13, 2001 for a System, Method And Article Of Manufacture For Location-Based Filtering For Shopping Agent In The Physical World. Here, a user inputs one or more items of interest into a personal digital assistant (PDA). The location of the user is determined and a query that includes the user location and the items of interest made to a network. The PDA then presents the user with customized offers from local stores having the items of interest. This shopping agent example is just one of the proposed applications which suggest that people are increasingly interested in having practical functions integrated in personal mobile devices.
Users continue to seek improvements in familiar personal mobile device applications and additional functionality to extend their usefulness. Task list management is one such application and shopping assistance another in which an extension of functionality is needed.